Amok - Softcover

On a sweltering ocean-liner travelling from India to Europe a passenger tells his story: the tale of a doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his duty and the pull of his emotions; a tale of power and desire, pride and shame and a headlong flight into folly.This is one the most intense and incisive of the novellas which brought Stefan Zweig to worldwide fame.

'I can't think of a writer who is more successful at depicting amour flu - what one critic describes as "sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois society" - nowhere more grippingly than in Amok in which a doctor, a Conradesque loner, is tipped into "a sort of human rabies" by an unattainable colonial wife' --Economist Intelligent Life

'To read Zweig is to be in the presence of a properly mature writer, for all that his characters are often in the grip of highly inappropriate desires... These are unforgettable stories, beautifully translated. Anthea Bell is a first-rate translator; she brings out the humour as well as the anguish that makes Zweig's work so sympathetically acute' --Guardian

'A brilliant writer' --New York Times